Mary Chase

• Born: February 25, 1907
• Birthplace: Denver, Colorado
• Died: October 20, 1981
• Place of death: Denver, Colorado

Other Literary Forms

Though best known for her stage comedies, Mary Chase also wrote two children’s novels, Loretta Mason Potts (1958), of which her 1969 play Mickey is a dramatization, and The Wicked Pigeon Ladies in the Garden (1968). In addition, she wrote film adaptations of three of her plays, Sorority House (1939), Harvey (1950), and Bernardine (1957).

Achievements

Mary Chase’s most significant achievement on stage was Harvey, which also garnered her most significant award, the Pulitzer Prize in drama, 1945. Harvey played for more than four years in its first run on Broadway (1945-1949), and for seventy-nine performances in a 1970 revival. For four months during the 1952-1953 season, Chase had two plays running concurrently on Broadway, Mrs. McThing and Bernardine. She received the William MacLeod Raine award from the Colorado Authors League in 1944 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Denver in 1947.

Biography

Mary Coyle (later Chase) was born February 25, 1907, in Denver, Colorado, to Irish immigrant parents. The youngest of four children, she grew up in an environment rich with Irish folklore and mythology, which later influenced her plays and children’s stories. A brilliant student, she was graduated from West Denver High School at the age of fifteen and studied classics at the University of Denver and later at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

On graduation, she began writing for the Rocky Mountain News and, in 1928, married fellow reporter Robert L. Chase. When a practical joke she devised got her fired, Chase concentrated on raising a family and writing plays for the regional theaters in Denver. In 1936, her first play, Me, Third, was produced in Denver, where it was such a success that producer Brock Pemberton was convinced it could succeed on Broadway. In March and April of 1937, retitled Now You’ve Done It, it played forty-three performances at the Henry Miller Theatre in New York—not a hit by Broadway standards. Her next play, Sorority House, did not tempt Broadway but interested Hollywood: It was filmed by RKO-Radio in 1939, starring Veronica Lake. After two more Chase comedies did not play beyond Boulder, Chase and Pemberton tried Broadway once more with Harvey and hit it big.

Not only was Harvey one of the biggest hits of the 1944-1945 season, but also it won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize in drama. The original production ran 1,775 performances, was revived on Broadway in 1970 for another 79, and has been in constant production on the regional, academic, and community theater stage ever since its close in New York in 1949. Enjoying her fame from Harvey, Chase decided to try her hand at serious drama. The Next Half Hour was even a bigger Broadway flop than her first, running only 8 performances in 1945. This experience, coupled with the emotional trauma of sudden fame and wealth, brought on a depression only momentarily assuaged by the success of the 1950 film version of Harvey starring Jimmy Stewart.

Riding the crest of the film’s success, Chase was able to put the finishing touches on two scripts in 1952, Mrs. McThing, which opened in New York in February, and Bernardine, which opened eight months later. Although neither would reach the iconic status of Harvey, both were modest hits, both at the box office and with the critics, and Bernardine was filmed by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1957.

The following year, Chase produced a children’s novel, Loretta Mason Potts. In 1961, her last original Broadway production, Midgie Purvis, ran for only twenty-one performances. In the next decade, Chase published three more plays, including a stage adaptation of her children’s novel, but none of them received significant theatrical production. The 1970 New York revival of Harvey was followed in 1972 by the Hallmark Hall of Fame televised version, and in 1975 by the London Stage revival. In 1981, Chase died of a heart attack in Denver.

Analysis

Mary Chase’s comedies are not only composed of fantasy: They are also about fantasy, its importance in refreshing the human spirit. In Harvey, Elwood P. Dowd is graced with visions of a giant white rabbit named Harvey, but in the end it is clear that other people—his sister Veta and psychiatrist Dr. Chumley—need Harvey more than Elwood does. Mrs. McThing presents two sets of fantasies: Mrs. Larue’s idealization of the well-behaved child she wishes her son Howay to be and Howay’s daydream of his ideal life of adventure. In Bernardine, the fantasy is the erotic wish-fulfillment of teenage boys in 1950’s America: The title character is the ideal woman created by a gang of boys.

In addition to fantasy, all three plays deal with the theme of respect for nonconformity. It might be more precise to say that in all three plays, a major character comes to realize that the only thing to which the supposed eccentric does not conform is other people’s expectations. In Harvey, Elwood drinks too much to suit his sister, who also wishes he would not rave about his giant rabbit friend. In Mrs. McThing, Mrs. Larue expects her son to behave like a “normal” boy who does as he is told, without realizing that her son’s behavior is normal and that her idealization is a fantasy. In Bernardine, the mother of an older child, this time a teenager, similarly expects her son to be her best friend and ridicules the gang with which he finds a more liberating self-identity.

Harvey

An incident from Chase’s childhood may have inspired the character of Elwood P. Dowd, the protagonist of Harvey, and her mother’s admonishment supplied a major theme. Chase’s mother stopped a group of boys from throwing snowballs at an old woman. The playwright’s mother shooed away the hooligans and told her daughter never to be unkind to a person others say is crazy because “crazy” people often have a deep wisdom. That lesson stuck with young Mary, and she turned it into a Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy. The audience’s sympathies in the comedy are tilted heavily in Elwood’s favor, and theatergoers half believe that the giant rabbit Elwood sees is real—especially when doors open and close when no one is on stage.

Chase has been accused of satirizing modern psychiatry in Harvey, but the actual target of the satire—if barbs as blunt and soft as hers can be called satire—is a tendency for twentieth century America to confuse respectability and conformity with sanity. Even if Elwood’s visions of a rabbit named Harvey are delusional (and the action of the play suggests they are not), the only thing threatened by the delusion is his sister’s social status. Virtually every character in the play except for Elwood exhibits a manic energy: his niece Myrtle, in her search for a husband; his sister, in her quest for acceptance in high society; the psychiatrists, in pursuit of acceptance of their theories (as well as what turns out to be a rather unhealthy desire to control people); and the strong-arm orderly, in his attempt to find a chance to turn his verbal threats into physical violence. In the midst of all this turmoil, Elwood’s calm suggests to the audience, subconsciously, even before the idea is corroborated by dialogue, that this supposed madman is the most rational character in the play.

However, the one irrational force that dominates the play is not fantasy but love—both in the romantic sense (though that is minor incident) and in the philosophical sense of self-giving. Elwood encourages young love wherever he finds it, particularly between the young psychiatrist Dr. Sanderson and Nurse Kelly. His sister Veta, on the other hand, suspects the sanitarium staff of having designs on her person. Both Dr. Chumley and his orderly Wilson have a well-developed eye for the ladies. Finally, Elwood is very fond of his invisible companion, but he is willing to give up Harvey to please his sister Veta.

Mrs. McThing

The fantasy in Mrs. McThing is effected in a way different from how it is brought about in Chase’s other plays, though it is most closely related perhaps to Harvey. Just as theatergoers are made to partake in Elwood’s delusion (if it is that) when they see doors open, presumably to accommodate a giant rabbit, in Mrs. McThing, they see everything from the point of the youngster Howay Larue. The ringleader of a crime mob seems to be at the top of the heap until his mother appears and slaps him for staying out late the night before. When the police search the gang for weapons, they discover only comic books, cereal, and bubble gum. The world of the play is the real world but seen through a child’s eyes, suggesting a further point about Chase’s fantasy: It is fantastic only if people hold certain presuppositions about the nature of reality, which Chase’s Celtic imagination does not automatically grant.

A more serious point to the fantasy, however, involves Howay’s mother. In the opening scene, she is amazed and delighted to find Howay behaving exactly as she always wanted: polite, obedient, and anticipating and fulfilling her every wish. However, the delight turns sour as she realizes that the “Howay” who seems to be her maternal wish-fulfillment is a hollow construct—in the language of the play, a “stick.” The fantasy logic of the play asserts that the real Howay has been replaced by a stick-Howay by the magic of a witch named Mrs. McThing. However, the magic is very realistic, because if a real little boy began to act out his mother’s image of how the ideal little boy should act, behaviorists would use the same sort of language: The boy, in acting out his mother’s needs rather than his own, becomes hollow, less real, a stick figure standing in for the “real” boy.

Part of the impossible ideal that Mrs. Larue wants to create for Howay is a matter of class—something that she has in common with Veta in Harvey and Mrs. Weldy in Bernardine. The cartoonish gangsters, like Wilson the orderly in Harvey or the teenage gang in Bernardine, are the supposedly undesirable element that the maternal figure—Mrs. Larue, Veta, and Mrs. Weldy—must learn to embrace or at least not to fear. To Howay, the gangsters represent the untidiness and avoidance of authority that is part of being a boy.

Bernardine

The teenage boys in Bernardine struggle in the same conflict as Howay in Mrs. McThing, though further along in the continuum. They, too, are pressured to conform to their mothers’ expectations, and their gang behavior is in a large part a reactionary refusal to do so, much like Howay’s idyll with gangsters. One minor character, Vernon Kinswood, represents the filial ideal of the only mother who appears in the play, Mrs. Ruth Weldy. Her son Buford, or “Wormy” as he is known to the gang, is pressured to be more like Kinswood, every mother’s dream. Instead he wants to be more like Beaumont, the leader of the gang, particularly when it comes to women. Yet Mrs. Weldy keeps her son on such a short leash that he feels he has no time for the rituals of courtship and so gains a reputation—both in the gang and among the girls of his high school—as a lecher.

The plot of Bernardine demonstrates a painful paradox about the nature of fantasy—that the more it becomes embodied in a real human being, the less real it becomes. Wormy’s friend Kinswood embodies the maternal ideal of Mrs. Weldy and her circle of friends. Yet when Kinswood rather sycophantically insinuates himself into adult conversation with the ladies, their delight wears off: His eagerness to please their parental expectations is too much for them to take. Similarly, for Wormy, Kinswood is merely tolerated as a cover. The more central fantasy, however, the adolescent male erotic dream that the boys call Bernardine, follows the same process of disillusionment on being embodied in Enid Lacy.

Wormy, tired of rejection by high school girls, vows to pick up an older, sophisticated woman in the lobby of the swankiest hotel in town. When the boys, who have come along to watch Wormy in his attempt, see the beautiful Enid, who so perfectly matches their made-up ideal, they instinctively proclaim her Bernardine. Yet when Wormy almost triumphs, getting into her hotel room, he discovers that the joy in a fantasy is precisely its unreality. Enid, who is going along with the pickup to feed her own fantasy, discovers the same lesson, underscored when she discovers that Wormy’s mother is one of her adult friends. Yet in exploring the limits of fantasy, Bernardine affirms the value of fantasy in helping people cope with the world.

Bibliography

Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A survey that puts Chase’s achievements into perspective.

Chapman, John, ed. The Best Plays of 1951-52. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952. This account explains how Mrs. McThing came to be written and produced.

Kerr, Walter. “Remembrances of Things Past.” In the God on the Gymnasium Floor, edited by Walter Kerr. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. In light of James Stewart’s 1970 Broadway revival of Harvey, Kerr observes how the play has held up over a quarter century and that its immense popularity threatens to obscure its technical brilliance. The greatest contributor to its success, however, is its simplicity.

Laufe, Abe. Anatomy of a Hit. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966. This analysis explains Harvey’s Pulitzer win.

Mantle, Burns, ed. The Best Plays of 1944-45. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945. Recounts the controversy over the Pulitzer Prize that year.

Miller, Jordan Y. “Harvey.” In American Dramatic Literature: Ten Modern Plays in Historical Perspective, edited by Jordan Y. Miller. New York: McGraw Hill, 1961. Faults apparent structural weaknesses in Harvey—a lopsided first act, too slow a pace, a love affair that goes nowhere—then admires the play for succeeding despite these difficulties because of its triumphant characterization of the protagonist, Elwood P. Dowd.

Nathan, George Jean. “American Playwrights Old and New.” In Theatre in the Fifties, edited by George Jean Nathan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Admires Chase’s craft but denies the consensus of the critics that Bernardine and Mrs. McThing are successful in treating fantasy on stage.

Sievers, W. David. “New Freudian Blood.” In Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama, edited by W. David Sievers. New York: Hermitage House, 1955. Considers Chase’s flop The Next Half Hour a botched attempt at realism but values both Mrs. McThing and Bernardine as contributions to the psychology of fantasy on stage.